Reached My Limits of Being Tracked Part 1

I’ve Reached My Limit of Tracking

This is Part 2 of a Series. Part 1 | Part 2
I have followed closely for years the increasing levels of tracking and surveillance by large tech/communication/transportation companies, data brokers, and now more and more from our government. This is a difficult topic for me as I am more alarmed by surveillance than most people I interact with, so it is easy to come across as a conspiracy theory nut to others. My experience is that people don’t like tracking, but they think it isn’t that serious. “Who cares if they can see where I have been? Who cares if they can read my email/messages?” It is becoming more important to recognize the if-I’m-not-doing-anything-wrong-then-it’s-okay mentality is extremely short-sighted.

We are living the old adage of the frog in warm water–if you raise the temp up slowly it will be tolerated. From the early stages of tracking, it was easy to see “feature creep” unfold, by slowly adding features that allowed more and more tracking to occur. It would continue to push to levels that we would not have tolerated only a couple of years ago, yet going through this cycle of increasing surveillance over and over again we have gotten numb to the levels we see today. People will resist increased levels of tracking, but they will tolerate it if it accommodates new features for our convenience.

I remember one of my first realizations of companies hiding tracking as a feature. Early in the iPod era, music was primarily purchased as CD’s and ripped to your computer to be downloaded to your device. At the time, they started to offer direct sale of individual songs for purchase over the internet, which again was downloaded to the iPod or listening device via computer, and later directly to the device. The only tracking was the purchase, so your listening habits were private. During that time, someone discovered that Apple started tracking what music you were listening to and relaying that back to their servers. The outrage was immediate–how dare they track what I listened to! They don’t own the music, I do! Apple pulled back and stopped relaying that information (it seems hard to believe public outrage over such a small thing compared to the level of tracking that is tolerated today).

Within less than a year, Apple reintroduced the tracking without any backlash. How? By offering “Album Art” for your tracks. By providing the artwork and song titles for your music, they had to analyze the music by relaying the information back to their servers to provide the correct art, song titles, and album information. That’s when it became clear that tech companies can increase tracking by offering features of convenience to the user, suddenly making the intolerable surveillance now tolerable. Over the years you can see how tech companies have increased tracking by increasing corresponding features for users. That is how we have steadily come to our enormous levels of tracking of today.

It is easy to point fingers at the large tech companies–Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon–but it goes well beyond that. The biggest offenders in my mind are the cell phone companies–Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, and many ISP providers, particularly Comcast. Don’t forget the automotive industry–they are tracking all location, audio, and video information from their cars. You know it has gotten bad when car user agreements list sexual activity as a possible facet of our lives they intend to track (Caltrider et al., 2023). Streaming services and providers like Roku, Amazon Fire, Sling, GoogleTV, Spotify often sell to data brokers or target advertising based on our usage of their services.

They are all squeezing the advertising dollars away from services that can’t do their level of tracking and are “choking” them out. Mass advertising is disappearing, and eventually so will the services supported by this advertising: broadcast television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and podcasting. Because they cannot easily track your actions and movements, they are all falling victim to competitive advertising services that can report on your every action and whim. The non-tracking services are dying as their advertising markets are dying. It will be sad not having those services when they are gone, then we are only left with news and entertainment that is heavily tracked. When that happens, anonymity in our reading and watching habits will not be an option anymore.

It is one thing to have companies gather and use information directly as a customer. It is harder to accept that my information is now available for thousands of companies I have had no direct dealings. Third party brokers, who I have no connection with, house enormous amounts of info about my entire life, all because it is sold or transacted by the companies I do have dealings with. This includes the big three financial credit services Transunion, Experian, and Equifax–I have not directly worked with these companies, yet they hold some of the most sensitive data about each and every one of us. That’s what makes the Equifax breach in 2017 so infuriating. Out of necessity I now have connections with those companies by creating accounts to freeze my credit–I don’t wish to deal with those companies, but I have to. It is even worse with the thousands of data brokers who buy and sell my info without my knowledge or control, primarily from telcos, ISPs, and free email providers. For example, because of European reporting laws, Microsoft had to reveal they have 772 partners they share data from Outlook (Saxena, 2024). That is way more than most of us would have guessed.

In part 2 of this series I will walk through specifics I have done to reduce (but not eliminate) my signals to tech companies.

This is Part 2 of a Series. Part 1 | Part 2

Resources

Caltrider, J., MacDonald, Z., & Rykov, M. (2023, September 6). Privacy not included: A Buyer’s guide for Connected Products. Mozilla Foundation. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/what-data-does-my-car-collect-about-me-and-where-does-it-go/

Saxena, M. (2024, January 18). Watch out windows 11 users: Microsoft may be sharing your outlook emails without you knowing – here’s how to stop it. TechRadar. https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/watch-out-windows-11-users-microsoft-may-be-sharing-your-outlook-emails-without-you-knowing-heres-how-to-stop-it
This is part 1 of a series. Part 1 | Part 2